‘People Don’t Really Know What We Stand For’

Are Democrats today really anything other than the Party of Not Donald Trump? Will they ever stop feuding over Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and the divisive 2016 primary that helped lead to Trump’s November upset?

As Washington wonders whether President Trump’s surprise deal with congressional Democrats to extend the debt ceiling heralds a new political reality—or just a spat among ruling Republicans—the complicated new politics of the Democratic Party are often left out of the mix.

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But make no mistake: Democrats are just as divided as Republicans these days. Embarrassed by their election losses, they are fighting over everything from their diagnosis of why Trump beat them in 2016 to how much to stake themselves on an oust-him-at-all-costs strategy now. Their internal battles may not be as sexy as the unprecedented hostile takeover of the GOP by an outsider president not beholden to it—yet they are just as consequential.

Consider this debate that broke out last week between Democratic Party Chairman Tom Perez and historian Michael Kazin.

I’d convened them along with several other leading Democrats for a special episode of The Global POLITICO on how the party planned to dig itself out of the Trump hole. But it only took a couple of minutes before it was clear that it’s much easier for them to attack Trump than articulate a shared mission.

Perez, President Barack Obama’s former labor secretary, was elected this spring to chair the beleaguered Democratic National Committee, and he insisted the party’s woes were largely tactical and technocratic—electoral reverses that could be undone by investing in “technology infrastructure” and pursuing a more aggressive, “every ZIP code strategy” of campaigning.

“It’s heartening to hear all that, Tom, but one thing that you’re not talking about is, what those values are, what the message is, what the policies are,” responded Kazin, a Georgetown scholar writing a history of the Democratic Party and editor of Dissent magazine who pointed out that his young associates and Sanders acolytes like them are pushing for a much sharper left turn. “They really want a very tough, progressive message.”

Perez had demurred when I asked whether he should commission an autopsy report on what went wrong for the party in 2016, but Kazin quickly offered up his own. And it was pretty devastating.

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“One of the problems that Hillary Clinton had, and one of the problems that Democrats still have,” he said, “is people don’t really know what we stand for.”

The ensuing back-and-forth made it clear there was in fact no answer to that yet beyond agreement over their shared disdain for Trump and the extent to which animus toward the 45th president is the galvanizing factor behind the unprecedented mobilization of Democrats across the country well in advance of next year’s midterm elections. Indeed, it seems reasonable to assume that the party base’s antipathy toward Trump is so powerful that it would prevent congressional Democratic leaders from future deals with him, at least those that might entail any actual compromise.

“What’s unifying, what the unifying sort of thread to all of that is, it’s against Trump,” said Mitch Stewart, who was a key staffer in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “We have to do more, I think, as a party and say, ‘What are people voting for, in addition to voting against Trump?’”

Neera Tanden, a close adviser to Clinton who runs the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, listened with exasperation. “We get lost in a debate between the Clinton and Sanders voters,” she said. “I hope sometime in my lifetime the 2016 Democratic primary will be over.”

But few thought there were any prospects of that—especially with Clinton’s release this week of a sharp-edged new book, “What Happened,” her account of losing the 2016 race that casts blame not only at her own campaign team but also at Sanders and other leading Democrats, such as former Vice President Joe Biden.

And clearly, all five participants in the conversation felt there was blame to go around. While none of them said so explicitly, their collective portrait of the Democratic Party nine months into the Trump era amounted to a fairly explicit rebuke not only of Clinton but also of the president who was the party’s leader for eight years.

It was striking, in fact, to hear Perez open by talking about “the loss of over 900 seats in state legislatures, the movement from 60 Democrats in the Senate to 48, the loss of governors and secretaries of state and state attorneys general, etc.,” over the course of the Obama presidency—and equally so to hear Tanden, who advised Clinton on her economic strategy in last year’s race and runs perhaps the party’s leading think tank, say “we have to show a bolder economic plan than we have before.”

Back in 2016, POLITICO Magazine convened this same group in the midst of the campaign to talk about the future of the Democratic Party—and I was struck by how little, in some ways, the conversation had changed. The 2016 session came at the end of the primary season, when Trump had won the Republican nomination by rallying white working-class voters to him and at a time when it was already clear that Clinton, bloodied by her primary fight with Sanders, was having trouble with that same group.

Of course, no one expected Trump’s November upset. But even then the Democrats I talked with were divided over whether to court those voters, or essentially write them off and emphasize instead Clinton’s appeal to the Democratic base of big-city liberals and minority groups. It was a debate, we later learned, that played itself out inside the Clinton campaign too—with the play-to-the-base side beating out those, like former President Bill Clinton, who worried about not competing for such a wide swath of the electorate.

This time, there was surface agreement on Perez’s “every ZIP code strategy”; how could there not be, with Trump having won the election by claiming the three swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on the basis of his appeals to their disaffected white majorities? But nagging worries remained: Could the Democratic Party address the lost white working class with its policies? Would it? Or were the economic fears Trump claimed to address really just a cover for a darker Trump agenda of racial exclusion and immigrant-bashing that Democrats won’t and shouldn’t cater to?

In the end, however, the ideological debates will probably have to wait. The Trump show is such a spectacle that any talk about the politics of policy inevitably gets overwhelmed—and quickly—by the politics of the overwhelming personality now in the White House. Can the party get rid of Trump by pushing hard on the rapidly proliferating investigations of his campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russian hacking of the 2016 election? Would Trump’s historically high unpopularity boost them in 2018? If Democrats did succeed in dumping Trump, would Vice President Mike Pence replacing him be even worse for the Democrats?

Perez summed up the crazy moment pretty well at the end of the hourlong conversation. “Rome is burning,” he said, and the Trump presidency, in all its unpredictable, divisive nastiness, is a “five-alarm fire.” But, for Democrats, booted out of the White House, losers on both sides of Capitol Hill, it is nonetheless a moment of opportunity.

A transcript of our discussion, a companion to a special episode of The Global POLITICO devoted to Trump’s “hostile takeover” of the GOP and what it means for the future of the Republican Party, is below.

Susan Glasser: Welcome to The Global POLITICO. I’m Susan Glasser, and this week it’s a special episode, a well-timed conversation on the Democrats’ post-Trump war within. A few weeks back we did this with Republicans—a party so divided we had to have two groups, one set of Washington insiders, another of pro-Trump outsiders. Listening to that, you really weren’t surprised to see President Trump and his emerging battle with the leaders of his own party; he very much represents, as his longtime friend Roger Stone told us in that episode, “the hostile takeover” of the GOP.

Well, on the surface, the Democrats are much more united—but that’s really just on the surface. Because they are united around hating Donald Trump. And that’s easy for Democrats. But it’s proving awfully hard, as this week’s Global POLITICO showed us, to unite around something more than that.

We were really grateful to have a great group of Democratic leaders, activists and thinkers join us for this conversation the other day in a restaurant near Capitol Hill. Tom Perez, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee; top advisers to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. We actually convened this group first in the middle of 2016 to ask them the same question: What is the future of the Democratic Party? And I thought it would be fascinating to bring them back together now that we’re deep into the Trump era.

First, some introductions are in order:

Neera Tanden: I’m Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress.

Michael Kazin: I’m Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University and editor of Dissent magazine.

Mitch Stewart: My name is Mitch Stewart. I’m a partner at 270 Strategies, and formerly, the battleground states director for the Obama campaign.

Jess O’Connell: I’m Jess O’Connell. I’m the new CEO of the DNC.

Tom Perez: And I’m Tom Perez, the chair of the DNC.

Glasser: So, Tom, when last we spoke, we certainly didn’t anticipate many of the events that have brought us to this, including the fact that you would be the next chair of the DNC, so I’m going to kick it right to you. When the late, lamented Reince Priebus was—before he was the White House chief of staff, he was chair of the RNC after the 2012 presidential election, and they commissioned, of course, an autopsy of what went wrong. They then felt free to disregard its conclusion. Is an autopsy in order of what went wrong for the Democrats in 2016?

Perez: I think we have a pretty good handle on what has been going on, and I would expand the aperture of your question, Susan. It’s not simply what happened in 2016, but what happened over the last eight years that resulted in the loss of over 900 seats in state legislatures, the movement from 60 Democrats in the Senate to 48, the loss of governors and secretaries of state and state attorneys general, et cetera.

That, to me—that’s the question we’ve been focused on at the new DNC, and a big part of the challenge is, we need a 12-month-a-year strategy. We stopped organizing. I visited an African-American church in Detroit after I took over, and a woman said to me, “You’ve got to stop showing up every fourth October at my church and telling me that you care.”

And, the new DNC, a big part of our rebuilding is that we have an every ZIP code strategy. We’re out there 12 months a year, and we’ve changed our mission statement. Our mission statement is no longer simply to help elect the president of the United States, but it’s to help elect Democrats, from the school board to the Senate. That’s why we’ve invested seven figures in Virginia, not simply to make sure that Ralph Northam and Justin Fairfax and Mark Herring get elected at the top of the ticket, but that we help people in the House of Delegates. We pick up 17 seats there in the House, we win.

And when we are organizing, when we’re organizing everywhere, when we’re leading with our values, whether it’s the Affordable Care Act debate, where we talked about how Democrats believe that health care is a right for all and not a privilege for a few—when we’re doing things like that and when we’re out there in partnership, whether it’s the Indivisible movement, or whether it’s the labor movement; whether it’s Planned Parenthood, or whether it’s Swing Left—when we’re out there with our partners, leading with our values, organizing 12 months a year, that’s how we succeed. And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s the new DNC.

Glasser: So, all right, I’m going to test this with the other members of this conversation. It’s a little bit of a, not technocratic solution. …but you’re certainly suggesting it’s a difference in approach, not philosophy. Is that what ailed the Democrats, do you guys think, in 2016?

Kazin: It’s heartening to hear all that, Tom, but one thing that you’re not talking about is, what those values are, what the message is, what the policies are. I mean, I think the young folks who write for Dissent magazine—that work on it, you know, they’re all Bernie Sanders people; they really want a very tough, progressive message.

Obviously, that’s not a message that will work everywhere in the country, but I think one of the problems that Hillary Clinton had, and one of the problems that Democrats still have, is people don’t really know what we stand for. I mean, in general terms they do, but, you know, there’s certain things that we move towards, like $15 an hour [minimum wage] and perhaps even single-payer [health care], though that’s obviously a big struggle, still—but I think a lot of people, especially the young activists who really are going to be helping the Democrats win next year and from now on, they really need to be inspired. And I’m not sure that’s really happening yet.

Tanden: Can I just jump in with one anecdote? Which is that when we have had unprecedented organizing over the last several months. We’ve worked, a lot of people, from the grass roots to Democratic senators, Democratic House members worked to defeat the Affordable Care Act, and I was in several speeches and chants and chain-ins and sit-ins, and the people there are the new activists. And those new activists are often, are really primarily, women, mothers. And I think the Democratic Party has to speak to all of the new activists, millennials, young people, people who feel like they’ve been left behind.

But there are also a lot of people who feel like Donald Trump is an existential threat to their children and their families. And those are the folks who are flooding town halls and speaking up for the values of the country and the party that is supposed to be about everyone, not just a few people.

So, I’ll let Tom defend the values of the Democratic Party, but I think that what we lose sight of is the whole breadth of activism that takes place. We get lost in a debate between the Clinton and Sanders voters, and I hope sometime in my lifetime the 2016 Democratic primary will be over.

Glasser: All right. I want to bring Mitch in here, but Neera, you brought it up. The 2016 primary is not … Just today, right, there’s reports about this upcoming Hillary Clinton memoir, and an early excerpt coming out in which she is scathingly writing, basically, well, fine, but Bernie Sanders isn’t even a Democrat. So, first of all, have you read the book? And second of all, do you think it’s going to divide the party even more?

Tanden: I haven’t read the book. And I think Hillary has a right to discuss what happened in the campaign, but I actually hope that we can quickly move on to the fights in front of us.

Unidentified: Amen.

Tanden: We have—

Glasser: Lots of head-nodding at the table here.

Tanden: We have what’s happening to the Dreamers, what’s happening in the budget, what’s happening across the country, where communities are really being torn apart by the actions of this administration. I think those are the issues that I hope we can move on into the future, and that I hope will inspire a whole new generation of activists going forward.

Glasser: Hope, maybe not experience, informing that answer. Mitch, I know you want to jump in here.

Stewart: So, I’ve seen a lot of different organizing models based off of where activists, or how activists come to those movements. And both aspirational, you know, for something or someone; and then also, against someone or something.

And in 2007, when I first started working for then-senator Obama, that was an aspirational movement. They were brought to that because of his personality, almost more than his set of policy prescriptions, because a lot of people then projected their own policy prescriptions on him once he was elected. But that was a positive and sort of—the volunteers and activists showed up because of him.

What I think is unique, happening right now, and I think this is a real gift for Democrats, is that the activism that I’m seeing is almost greater than anything I’ve witnessed before. And it is everywhere. You could go into the reddest congressional districts and Indivisible or another group could have a rally or protest and hundreds of people would show up.

And what’s unifying, what the unifying sort of thread to all of that is, it’s against Trump. And so, you’re seeing in a lot of congressional districts, whether it’s special elections, or whether it’s town halls or protests, a lot of activism. And if you look at the generic Dem right now, I think it’s plus-eight for Democrats on the ballot.

So, what I’m somewhat cautious about, or nervous about, is, that’s good, but that doesn’t get us the House back, and it’s a solid foundation for us to build a winning strategy, but it’s not enough for us to have the real impact that I think we all want, which is, how do we put a stop to Trump? And to me, at least, winning back the House is maybe the clearest way of doing that.

And so, for me there has to be an end associated with where we’re at right now. So, we see all of this resistance movement, and it’s really powerful and it’s organic, and it’s everywhere, it’s distributed. But we have to, then, parlay that activism into something positive so that we get from 8 points to 10 points, or 12 points, so we actually do win back the House.

And that’s going to be the missing key for us. And we have time to figure it out; we have a lot of time. And we’re certainly in a strong position right now; we have a good foundation. But we have to do more, I think, as a party and say, “What are people voting for, in addition to voting against Trump?”

O’Connell: Why, I couldn’t agree more. You know, the movement that we’ve seen, we’ve done an unprecedented amount of organizing over the summer through our Resistance Summer program, and it was born out of the resistance. It started the day after the election with the women’s marches all over the country, and it continued on through the summer.

And what we see as we sort of end the summer and head into the fall is really our program called Rising to Organize, which is that transition, really, from—look, we’re always going to have to hold Republicans accountable. There’s no question about that; we’re going to continue to do that. But, as we move into the fall we do have to talk about our vision. We do have to bring these folks that are—that some have never been political in their lives, we’re seeing that.

We’ve organized in all 50 states; we’ve talked to hundreds of thousands of people over the summer, and they are talking about good jobs; they’re talking about health care; they’re still worked about health care. And these are the kind of bread-and-butter issues that we want to talk about, as well, that folks at the door want to talk about, and we’ve got to translate that as we move forward into the fall.

Perez: I mean, the two big prizes for 2017 are New Jersey and Virginia. The last time Democrats won in both states was 2005, and we know what happened in 2006, and again, past is not prologue. We have a lot of work to do, and Mitch’s point about putting forth our affirmative message is absolutely on the mark.

What I’ve seen in Virginia—and I’ve spent a lot of time there—is exactly that is happening. We have a remarkable candidate for governor in Ralph Northam; we have a remarkable candidate in New Jersey in Phil Murphy, and they’re not simply talking about Donald Trump. They’re talking about what they’re going to do.

Ralph Northam’s entire life has been a lifetime of service, service to others. He’s a pediatric neurologist, and he is talking about creating good jobs everywhere, creating pathways to opportunity, whether you live in Roanoke, or whether you live in Fairfax County. He’s talking about health care as a right for all and not a privilege for a few. And Eddie Gillespie can’t even figure out whether he supports or opposes the Affordable Care Act; he’s had a lifetime of service to the Koch brothers and to large pharmaceutical industries, and voters are paying attention.

And they’re paying attention in New Jersey as well, and that’s why I think that we are poised in 2017 to replicate what we did in 2005.

And this is a 13-year election, because whoever wins these races is presiding over redistricting, and we picked a lousy year as Democrats back in 2010 to get our butts kicked, because it has had a 10-year residual effect.

Glasser: This flows from that to the Trump question, which, obviously, there’s a backward-looking version of it, which is: Was there too much focus on Trump to the exclusion of a message that people could get behind in 2016? But of course, there’s also the forward-looking version of that. Candidates in Virginia or New Jersey for governor won’t directly face the issue of Trump, but those for Congress potentially will.

And, everyone here at this table will potentially face the question at some point of what should Democrats do and say about Donald Trump when it comes to the prospect of people already wanting to file impeachment motions, for example. How does the Democratic Party handle that? How do individual Democrats handle the politics of that?

It’s not up to you exclusively to define your agenda around health care, for example, right? You’re going to have to deal with the Trump elephant in the room no matter what. So, I guess that’s sort of the forward-looking version of it.

Perez: Well, I mean, Donald Trump and Eddie Gillespie and the Republicans in the Commonwealth of Virginia are the No. 1 impediment to Medicaid expansion. Voters understand that, and so, when they go to the polls, there’s a lot of health care voters in Virginia. There’s a lot of health care voters in New Jersey. And when you have a party whose belief is that health care is a privilege for a few, like the Republicans believe, that has consequences.

And so, again, I think we have an opportunity. And we have an opportunity to go into rural Virginia and tell that story, and that’s exactly what we’re doing, because Democrats all too frequently ignored rural pockets of this country. And that’s a shame on us moment. And that’s why we have an every ZIP code strategy.

Tanden: The one thing I’d say is, I do think that the Trump presidency, even for the resistance, there is pre-Charlottesville and a post-Charlottesville moment, and Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville was a kind of extraordinarily shameful moment, I think, actually for the country. But also, as progressives it is really hard to think through how you actually talk about like a tax plan or something with somebody, and that response. But I think the way I think about this is that so far Trump has done everything he could possibly do to pit Americans against each other, to sow division, to fuel distrust of American against American, to adopt a kind of Bannonite strategy of fueling racial antagonism, xenophobic antagonism against Dreamers, et cetera.

And I think a core principle of the Democratic Party has to be a defense of equal rights for every American. At the same time, when you look at the election, and not just the 2016 election, but the elections to come, Democrats have to do better than we did in 2016 in communities, in rural communities where people feel like they’ve been in a slow burn recession or depression for years, not just months.

And so, from my perspective, we actually have to have a stronger, bolder economic message for this that’s not just for white working-class voters, but for people who don’t go to college who are white, black, Latino, or wherever. We have to communicate that we care about Detroit and Appalachia, and people suffering in both are problems for the country and a problem for the Democratic Party, not just one or just the other.

And I think Trump wanted to use this campaign to basically say to a lot of folks that liberals hate you. And we have to show a bolder economic plan than we have before, one, I think, that needs to be focused on jobs, that communicates to those voters that we do care, that we care as much about their success as any other success, anyone else’s success.

Glasser: Okay, so you want to talk about jobs. But do you want to talk about Russia? Are you going to be able to avoid talking about Russia? That’s really the question.

Tanden: I do think the issue is that we have learned, would be peripathetic—paratethetic? Peripatetic. I thought I’d just get pathetic in there. That you can do a lot of different things, and my own view of this is that we saw throughout the months of July that people can focus both on a challenge to our democracy, which is what happened in Russia, as well as health care for millions of people.

And I do think progressives have to learn to walk and chew gum in the Trump era, but they’re doing that.

Kazin: I think we’re forgetting the one thing, though, is that we’re talking about message and process, which is a very Washington thing to do, but the Democratic Party as an institution, as you all know, doesn’t really exist in southwest Virginia the way it does in Alexandria, Virginia, or D.C., where Hillary won 93 percent of the vote.

So, I think part of the problem is not just the message, but who is presenting the message. I mean, when you have people like the governor of Montana, Steve Bullock. Who clearly understands in this overwhelmingly white and Christian state how to talk to people. I worry that we are looking out at America from our liberal bastions still. And that’s to Russia, too. I mean, what happened with Russia, as far as we know, is terrible, and we don’t know the bottom of it, but in the end, I don’t think most Americans are going to vote Democratic instead of Republican because of Russia.

And of course, even if somehow Trump is impeached, which I think the Republican Congress would never do, we’ll probably have a more efficient, much worse, president to replace him.

Tanden: So, I just need to jump in here and say that I hate to say that not everything is politics, but not everything is politics. And if, if, I think an incredible assault on democracy happens, I hope democratic officeholders, be they Republican or Democrat—democrat with a small d—officeholders would actually respond. And I actually disagree slightly, in that if you look at public polling, independents care deeply, and it has been a deep weakening of Donald Trump amongst traditionally conservative voices, independent leanings, that have been really concerned about Russia.

But, even if it polls at zero, I think people should actually—I hate to lecture a professor about this, but I think people should actually do the right thing, which is defend your democracy against a foreign adversary.

Kazin: Oh, of course, I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m not disagreeing with you. I’m just saying I think—

Glasser: Well, but it’s interesting on the politics, though, I mean, did the Democratic Party benefit from Watergate? Right?

Unidentified: They did.

Male voice: Obviously.

Female voice: Yes. The answer is, they did.

Male voice: Yes, yes, they did.

Glasser: Mitch, I do want to give you a chance to jump in here, both on the Trump question, which is how much is uniting around a message of this is not the president we want, going to be inevitable regardless of the politics?

Stewart: So, I have a unique perspective on this, because in 2009 and ’10, I was the national director at Organizing for America, and we had a front row seat at the 2010 election, and it wasn’t a surprise. Like, we had the research; we saw the polling; and we predicted that we would lose the House three months before the actual election. And so it was like this slow-moving accident that you couldn’t get out of; you were stuck in the car.

And one of the reasons that it was so successful for Republicans is it was a national election. We were trying to localize it and Republicans were trying to nationalize it, and they were successful and we were not.

I suspect that that same dynamic will hold true in 2018, or at least, I hope it does. I hope it’s a national election, and not a local election. I think that benefits the Democrats.

But one of the failures they had in 2016, like thousands of failures, and what I thought was going to happen with that election, but certainly the biggest for me personally was, I had a lack of imagination of how bad we could do with some of these white working-class voters. I assumed that Barack Obama was the floor with those voters, and that the diversifying of the electorate, plus having that floor, would provide us with a pretty steady foundation moving forward.

And I was wrong. And what I’m afraid of, us as a party, and maybe this isn’t true in 2018, but it certainly can be in 2020, is that we think the floor is right now.

Stewart: What’s to say it couldn’t get worse? Right? Can it drop another five or ten points in some of these places? Donald Trump lost states that look like America. He lost Virginia. He lost Colorado. He lost Nevada. He won states that don’t look like America: Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania don’t necessarily look like America, if you look at the census statistics.

And so, there’s a host of states like that, where if we have to, if we lost the industrial Midwest, our only play then is like North Carolina, Florida, and then waiting for Arizona and Texas, which will eventually turn blue, but how do you catalyze or quicken that process?

So, I am concerned. And I do feel like we have to come up with some type of message, and I think it’s an economic empowerment message that shouldn’t be geared just towards white working-class voters. It should be geared towards everybody, because I think it impacts everybody. But we have to have a positive message that talks about how we’re going to improve the economic lives of voters, period.

Perez: But again, I agree with what Mitch has said. At the same time, I think it goes beyond message. We’ve got to show up. We’ve got to be present. We’ve got to have an every ZIP code strategy. I’ve traveled around this country over the last seven or eight months, and I went to rural Wisconsin—and I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I’m proud of that. I often have said, I don’t have a Ph.D. in economics, but I have a Ph.D. in Buffalo-nomics. And Buffalo is a wonderful, union town, the City of Good Neighbors. And I got married in Wisconsin, and I’ve spent a lot of time in both states. And we can win both states, but it starts with having an every ZIP code strategy.

I was in northwest Wisconsin, Dave Obey’s old district, traveled there earlier this year, and I met a guy who drove four hours to this town hall meeting. We thought 40 people would show up; 150 people showed up. And he said, “I feel politically homeless, Tom, because the Democratic Party hasn’t been here,” and that is a shame-on-us moment.

If you look at the data in Ohio, we—Hillary Clinton was competitive in 2016 in the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus metro corridors; she lost Ohio largely because she got clobbered in the rural counties. And again, we can’t simply focus on the 2016 cycle. We’ve got to focus on a broader—

This issue, and the reason why message is important, but infrastructure is equally important, is because if we’re not there talking to folks in Roanoke about why the Affordable Care Act is really important to them, well, then, we’re not going to be competitive in Roanoke. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. This ain’t a sexy job, you know? We’d love to talk the whole time about messaging and what we have to stand for, and that is important.

But if we ignore the conversation about technology infrastructure, and about organizing infrastructure, and about voter protection infrastructure, and about all of those core elements—millennial engagement, next-gen infrastructure—we’re going to continue to leave opportunity on the table.

And that’s what we’re focused on, is not only the message side of this, but that infrastructure building. That’s what we’re doing in Virginia right now, and in New Jersey, and we won special elections this year in places we have no business winning. We had two special elections in Oklahoma for state races where DNC investments helped to elect Democrats in districts that Donald Trump won handily. And that’s, we have to scale that.

Tanden: The thing is, I would just say, just to say it a little bit. I totally agree with both sides of this; it’s infrastructure. But I also think we have to recognize, I wouldn’t call it message so much, but answers for people. So, at the end of the day, if you look at what’s happened in a lot of these communities, if you just pull out white non-college voters, or white non-college people in the country have had a hard time moving up over the last several decades.

Other groups have moved up, mostly because we’ve had a civil rights revolution, which is all to the good. I think the challenge for Democrats is that there has been a right wing noise machine that basically has told these voters that liberals always hate them, and that helped move the numbers up.

But, just as a reminder, Obama won all these Midwestern states in 2012, so the issue is, how do you get to a place where you are doing better with those voters? And I think the issue in front of us is: Trump is dividing people against each other; he’s going to try and sow racial division; so you have to figure out an answer.

I think really the only answer for the Democratic Party, or for progressives at large, is to have an answer about how these people who haven’t been to college, who haven’t had a lot of things given to them in life, are going to do better, year after year after year.

And I think we have to have a bolder answer on jobs. We put forward an idea of a Marshall Plan for jobs, meaning you take just a fraction of the tax cut money and spend it on actually employing people to solve the country’s problems, and infrastructure, child care, health care, education, and I think that we have to have solutions that actually answer for both. How they’re going to do better years from now, and their kids are going to do better, in communities that feel like they are left out of the conversation.

Kazin: Definitely to the problems that Trump did put his finger on, was why he won these Midwestern states, is because he said the problem is the elites and the problem is foreigners, is immigrants, is aliens—and that’s an old strategy, as you know, going back to George Wallace, going back to the 19th century, as well.

And it’s very tough, at a time when, as Neera said, these older white working-class people have not done well—in fact, they’ve done worse than their parents did, and they have no hopes for their children doing much better, and there is this division between people who go to college and don’t go to college. All these things we know.

I mean, I think you said Trump’s dividing us. Yes, but people were already divided; Trump just expressed that division. And we have to find a way to, within a very heterogeneous party, even though we’re the minority, we’re a much more diverse party, of course, than the Republicans are. How do we both talk about universal programs, have a universal message, and make sure we’re talking about recent immigrants and non-immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT people, as well? To me, that is a serious problem.

Glasser: And, by the way, I should note that this is exactly the conversation that we had last year in this group, before the election. So, even though none of us anticipated the ultimate outcome, I went back and looked, and here’s what Mitch said more than a year ago in this group.

Stewart: Uh-oh.

Glasser: No, no, no, it’s good. You were being very hard on yourself, because you said I didn’t get how out of touch we were, but actually, Mitch, what you said in that conversation was, “the big thing that I’m frustrated with was that I feel like our message to white working-class voters is the same message that we’ve had for the last 30 years, and it hasn’t worked. We keep losing them.”

And by the way, this was just in June of last year, at the end of the primaries. “And so, do we keep saying similar things, or repeating things that we know are in their economic interests, but, frankly, haven’t translated into support?”

Neera, you responded, and you said, okay, well, “but I have, to be honest, some reactions on multiple levels here. Are people really reacting to changing economics, or is it also changing demographics? It’s a lot easier for us to say it’s about economics and not to address the part of Trump’s message that might be about immigration or demographics or race, than it is about the economy.”

Now, I’m struck by the fact that immediately in 20 minutes, we’re right back in this group today to that question. Is it about economics? Or, are we looking at something different that’s dividing us? And the Democratic response to that, obviously, would depend on what your analysis is.

Tanden: I’ll just say very briefly, I think it’s really hard to unpack. I mean, we’ve done a bunch of analysis of the 2016 elections, and you can say people are—there are a lot of poll questions where it seems like people are responding to changing, I think the euphemism would be culture. And there are lots of ways that you can see that it’s race, I mean, or it’s economics.

One example is, that when you look at the counties that moved Obama to Trump, a lot of those counties have a high proportion of jobs that can be outsourced. I think it’s really hard to know whether people are more open to racialized message, or racist messages, if they are economically struggling, or not. That’s a kind of metaphysical question.

From my perspective, though, I just don’t think it’s easy for the Democratic Party, or really, truly, to be honest, the right thing to do, to tailor your message to people who have racial animosity. But again, Barack Obama won in 2012, and he won these states. And there are Obama-Trump voters that it seems to me possible to get back. But our hope, really, is to have a stronger, bolder economic message for them that actually isn’t the same message as the last 30 years. I completely agree with you. It’s something that is more concrete about how your life is going to be tangibly improved.

Perez: Let me put my labor secretary, or former labor secretary, hat on, for a moment here. Income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time. You look at the post-World War II period, for the decades following World War II, up until 1980, when you had wages and productivity going up hand in hand. Workers helped bake the pie of prosperity, and they shared in the spoils.

And not coincidentally, that’s when we had increasing labor union density, because the right to organize America’s greatest generation who fought in World War II came home and led the labor movement. And the, starting around 1980, we started to see the flattening out of wages, and not coincidentally, the attacks on the labor movement. You started seeing lowering of labor union density. When you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu, my friend Lee Saunders has said, and he is correct.

We’ve seen this over a 40-year period. When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, if you were a baggage handler for Eastern Airlines, you had a middle-class job. Now, you go work for United Airlines, they outsource it, so you’re making a minimum wage because they thought that that would be a smart move. It was a dumb move, actually.

Male voice: What do we do about that, though, is the question.

Perez: Well, actually, places like Southwest Airlines, baggage handlers are actually middle-class jobs at Southwest Airlines, and you know what? They’ve been the most profitable domestic carrier over the last 15 years.

And so, the dam broke in 2016 for a lot of folks because they were feeling this decades-long angst. And Barack Obama did heroic work saving us. We were at the precipice of a great depression and he was able to pull us out; but we have a long way to go. And so, I continue to believe, and Trump has cleverly put fear on the ballot and fear in the eyes of folks, and my parents taught me that if you blow out your neighbor’s candle, it doesn’t make your candle shine any brighter.

And I continue to believe that we are better positioned than any country on the planet to lead in the 21st century, but we do have to be bold. And actually, our platform in the Democratic Party is pretty darn bold, and folks from Senator Sanders’ coalition and Secretary Clinton’s coalition came together around that platform.

But, we have to fight for the right to organize. We just passed Labor Day, and again, every day should be Labor Day. We have to fight for the basic proposition that apprenticeship is a wonderful ticket to the middle class. When we’re fighting for things like paid leave, we’re the only industrialized nation on the planet that doesn’t have some form of paid leave—these are not bold ideas elsewhere in the world.

And I think when we show voters in every ZIP code across America that we’re fighting for them—I mean, Dr. King said, what good is a seat at the table if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger? I think that’s a message that resonates everywhere, and we have to boldly put that forth, and we’ve got to organize around it everywhere so that people understand, in Wisconsin, or in the heart of Baltimore, what we stand for.

O’Connell: And the tactics matter, too. We’ve talked a lot about the organizing; we’ve talked about the messaging, all of which are correct. But the second piece of that, one that we’re focused on at the national party, is technology and data and infrastructure. This is an incredibly important part of winning campaigns and electing Democrats, and we’ve been woefully outspent by the Republicans. They’ve spent $175 million since 2013. The Democratic Party hasn’t seen a technology investment in a decade, okay?

So, there are tactics around the work that we’re doing, regardless of message, that we’ve got to get done, and that is the neighbor-to-neighbor communication and the boots on the ground, reinvesting in state parties and doing the organizing. But also, a massive investment in technology and data so that we can meet people where they are and have those conversations.

Glasser: Okay, so, Mitch, catch us up, though, on the demographics aspect of this. I mean, how much do you think that Obama was holding back the tide of change that was going to break against Democrats? Or, was the previous view basically correct, but you had a flawed candidate?

If the previous idea was actually Republicans are on the wrong side of demographic history and you can see this Trump election as sort of a yawp—you know, a last-ditch standing athwart history saying no? You’re suggesting that maybe that’s not the case, and that maybe it’s Democrats who could still fall more.

Stewart: I think, during Obama’s years, we had somewhat of a bipolar electorate, so in 2008 the electorate looked much different than 2010; 2012 was much different than 2014.

Glasser: And the reason for that swing, just be clear, is because Americans participate at such low levels that the turnout can change dramatically?

Stewart: Yes. So, in 2016, I don’t feel like turnout was the reason that Secretary Clinton lost. I think it was more about underperforming, specifically, with the group of voters that we’ve been talking about, and not really underperforming, maybe a little bit with African-Americans, but I think she did better with Latinos than Obama did, so it wasn’t really a turnout game, I don’t think.

I think it was specifically with this cohort of voters, white working-class voters, but without college degrees, where Democrats suffered. And it wasn’t just Secretary Clinton. I think it’s easy to sort of second-guess the strategy. Democrats across the country lost those voters. We lost them in Wisconsin; we lost them in Iowa; we lost—so you had Russ Feingold, who has long been seen as a champion for working-class people, get beat in Wisconsin, when he was leading up until about two weeks before the election, or at least close.

So, it’s not just a Secretary Clinton problem. I think it’s a Democratic problem. And one of the things I wish we would focus more on, we’ve had all kinds of activism. We’ve had marches for science. Alright, when in a million years would you think that there would be hundreds of marches across the country to support science? But we’ve had it.

What we haven’t seen, though, are demonstrations or protests around job site closings, or other things that are really going to impact working-class people. Take your racial identity out of it—just people who rely on these jobs that are somewhat disposable, or they don’t feel are super-secure, and I wish we could focus this energy, this activism, on an issue that I know really resonates with people so it does show that we’re fighting for them, so it does show these values that Democrats, that we have.

But right now, we’re sort of almost playing into the stereotype that Trump is painting of us, and it’s a concern I have.

Tanden: Well, I guess what I’d say is, I think this is an important, that the health care fight was an important fight on many levels, but I do think their activists and progressive leaders were basically arguing to defend the health care of millions of people who were mostly—to speak a hundred percent candidly about this—mostly people in rural communities. I mean, that health care bill that they dreamed up had the worst most miserable pain for rural, middle-aged, low-income folks, and was actually easiest on upper-income millennials in cities.

So, I think that that fight did become a fight where a lot of progressive leaders could say, I am here for this basic thing, which is that you should keep your health care and you should not be subject to the whims of the Congress that wants to rip this health care away from you. And it was really a lot of activists who saw it in those terms.

But I take your point that on some of these issues it can kind of seem far removed from bread and butter topics, but as we go through the Trump administration, we have to recognize that for all of his rhetoric during the campaign, his administration so far has been a war on working-class people of all colors. I mean, from the budget, to tax policy, to health care, to executive actions against overtime, to a whole range of things—undermining unions.

This has all been a giant bait and switch for him. He talked about reining in Wall Street and helping working-class people, and he’s been attacking working-class people and giving Wall Street a massive, free load.

Glasser: Chairman Perez, it’s easier to bash Trump, isn’t it, in some ways, than it is to get everybody on board with what the message should be?

Perez: Well, you know, we’ve worked very hard to make sure we are communicating our inclusive message of opportunity in every ZIP code for everyone, a brighter future, better tomorrow, and a better deal for everyone.

But it is undeniably challenging when you have someone announcing North Korea policy via Twitter. And his own, apparently, his own generals learning it via Twitter at the same time. That’s undeniably dangerous. And that is why we will continue—and again, it’s been one of the best things that I have had the privilege of doing was hiring Jess O’Connell, because we have to do everything that we’re talking about, and then some.

Because if we don’t build this infrastructure of success, think about what Jess just pointed out—$175 million since 2013 spent by the Republican Party on technical—the RNC—on technology infrastructure. And we weren’t keeping up. And it has consequences.

One area where I want to respectfully take some issue is, I hear frequently, and I don’t think it’s in this debate, but I want to make clear that I hear frequently from folks that we either have to focus on white working-class voters, or focus on the diverse tent that is the Democratic Party, and I could not categorically reject that proposition more strongly.

I firmly believe that our message of inclusion and opportunity resonates everywhere. When we talk about health care as a right and not a privilege, and the impact of the repeal efforts, that resonates everywhere, because everybody in every ZIP code has benefited in one way, shape or form, and frankly, in terms of under-performance, I think we have all too frequently tended to take some of our core constituencies for granted.

African-American women, for instance, are the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, and we need to do more to make sure that we engage them, that we don’t take them for granted. We need to be there. And again, I keep thinking about that woman I met in Detroit shortly after my election, who said, “You’ve got to stop showing up every fourth October and telling me that you care.”

One of the things we’re trying to do is take the word off-year out of our lexicon, because we’ve tended to be an accordion as a party. We expand in the presidentials; we shrink in between; and we scratch our head and wonder why we lose midterms.

Glasser: All right. Michael, has the chairman of the party convinced you?

Kazin: Not really, not yet. Look, I want him to. Part of the problem, I think, is we have to talk about what are the inclusive programs that we’re going to be pushing? What’s the inclusive conversation we’re going to be having? Because we are a divided country; we have always been a divided country, but even more divided now, thanks to Trump and a lot of other things, as well.

I think the root of working class is work, you know, and Sherrod Brown, Senator Sherrod Brown, as you know, has a really nice, long, big program about how to reinvent work. We have to think about what the future is going to look like for people. People are afraid of robotization; they’re afraid of globalization; they’re afraid of all these things. And Trump’s solution to that is: shut the borders; America first; everything’s got to be made here, which is of course, not realistic—in his own companies everything’s not made here at all—but I think we have to engage in issues that do cross these demographic boundaries.

And one is, what is work going to look like in the future? How are Democrats going to be able to give people a sense that they can have good jobs, or if they don’t have good jobs, maybe they have to have universal basic income—we have to have a longer discussion about the future. This is not just an intellectual exercise; it’s an exercise about giving people hope.

One of the smartest things a guy named Gary Young, a journalist who writes for the Guardian, said about the 2016 election, I keep remembering it. He said, “Donald Trump gave his people reason to fear; Hillary Clinton did not give her people reason to hope.” And that’s—one of the things Obama did, whether with vague abstractions or not, he gave people a sense to say that in fact, Democrats could address the future. And I think that’s one of the things we haven’t quite done yet. Opportunity, yeah, but everyone talks about opportunity, right? You have to put flesh on that.

Tanden: I would just say I agree with Tom, that this is a very false debate between—

Perez: False choice.

Tanden: False choice between defending civil rights, and anyway, we’re not going to have a choice, because Trump is going to continually attack Dreamers or voting rights or something else, and parties are called on to defend core principles, and if we didn’t, people shouldn’t vote for Democrats to begin with.

But I guess I would say, one important thing to go forward is, look, we don’t have great answers to what jobs will look like in 10, 20, 30 years. And I think it’s right for people to have some anxiety in a world where driverless cars are going to take over. Like, how are you going—it’s gotten really, how are you going to have a job in 10 years, and how are your kids going to have a job in 10 years, if you haven’t gone to college or had a lot of hand-ups in the system, basically.

I think that Democrats have to think through answers we haven’t in the past: How we are going to create those jobs? How should we restructure the entire tax code? Should we have things like a payroll tax, when jobs are so scarce? They weren’t—basically the architecture of our employment law, tax law, all these things were from the 1930s—and I do think that one benefit of Donald Trump, which is not worth it, but one perverse thing is, he has widened the scope of things that we should discuss.

Glasser: No, there’s a ferment clearly that we’re—

Tanden: Yes, new ideas needed. And I do think, I think the candidate—I’ll be Pollyannaish—I think the candidate three years from now who has the best answer to how we’re going to have jobs into the future, and how we can actually do that, will do better in the process than anyone expects.

Stewart: Sure. Well, I said this as a joke to a couple of my colleagues and they didn’t laugh, so I’m going to repeat it, assuring me the same response. I feel like some of the debates that we’re having right now around work—watch Game of Thrones—are similar to, like, the fights that we’re having in Westeros, you know, between these families that have been fighting for years.

Male voice: Who’s the dragon? Who’s the dragon?

Stewart: I’ll get to that. From my perspective, and what’s coming down the pike are like the White Walkers that are going to be like busting through the wall, and change everything dramatically. And we’re having like these old fights that aren’t going to be relevant in 10 or 15 years, because just the whole scenery is going to change, and I agree with you, Neera.

I hope whoever our nominee is in 2020, has at least some foundation on how to address that. Because right now, no candidate, at least to my knowledge, is really addressing it. Except for a cat; I’m sure that they are.

Glasser: Well, I’m not sure Mitch got any laughs with that, but he certainly got a lot of vigorous head-nodding, so it seems like agreement.

So, we’ve got to finish with a final lightning round. I think the question of 2020 is one of the things. Three very short questions for everybody: 2020 contenders. Right now, we are talking about a list that seems pretty familiar and backward-looking in some ways, so who are some names that you all can serve us, No. 1. No. 2, will Donald Trump serve out his entire term in office? And No. 3, what is one word for the state of the Democratic Party today?

Tanden: I’ll start. I guess I think that there’s going to be like 25 people, or 30 people, or 50 people running for president in 2020 because I think a lot of people—to be candid about it—are like, if Donald Trump can be president, so can I. And I think there’s a whole crop, a new generation of people who aren’t on the tip of anyone’s tongue, just like Bill Clinton wasn’t on anyone’s tongue; just like a lot of people didn’t expect Barack Obama to take off like he did. I think we will have a lot of new people running, and there are obviously a lot of fantastic people who have run before, or standard-bearers, right. All right. So, I think there’s just going to be a ton of those people.

Glasser: No. 2 is, will Donald Trump serve out the remainder of his term? And No. 3, one word for the party.

Tanden: I hope not is my second. And then on the third, revitalizing. I do see a ferment that’s changing the party as we speak.

Kazin: So, I won’t be shy saying I think we need a figure like a Sherrod Brown, or maybe Al Franken. They’re white guys, it’s true, but—or Elizabeth Warren—I mean, someone who can talk in more inclusive ways about jobs and about work and about the future.

Will Trump survive? I have a bet with my wife, actually, that he will, and whoever wins has to take the other one to their favorite restaurant. So, either way, I win.

Glasser: So you’re a winner either way, yeah, exactly.

Kazin: Either way I win, but you know, I hate to say, I kind of hope so, in the sense that, yes, he’ll be terrible, but I want the Republicans just to remain divided. It’s not good for the country, but I think in the end I want people to realize what a terrible guy this is, and I’m afraid that that’s not going to happen if somehow he resigns or somehow gets impeached and we have Pence instead.

And last, one word. Reinvention. Re-creation. Revitalization.

They’re all good words, yeah, but they all begin with the same prefix.

Stewart: So, I agree with Neera, I think there’s going to be 20 to 25 people who, not only seriously think about it, but actually run. And so what I think is going to be interesting is that both during the Iowa caucuses and maybe the New Hampshire primary, you might have the winner with 15, 16, 17 percent. We haven’t seen that since, I think, Jimmy Carter in ’76, when I think undecided actually was the winning caucus number, and Jimmy Carter was like second.

So, that will just be interesting. And the other thing I’ll say is, I don’t think Bernie Sanders, if he decides to run again, will have as much oxygen as he had in 2016; there’s going to be a lot of other powerful people that will compete for that same space that he had basically to himself in 2015 and ’16.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that—and so I’ll disagree with you a little bit here—that, like Mike Pence is going to be a worse version or more efficient version of Trump. I think Trump is as low as we can go. I don’t know if he’ll be impeached or if he’ll serve out, but I don’t subscribe to the notion that Mike Pence would come in and be like a super-efficient conservative president; in fact, I think he has a lot less appeal than Donald Trump does with those specific voters.

And then my word is renew. I’m optimistic about the future.

Glasser: Jess, I know you’re going to have a word that doesn’t start with an RE, but—

O’Connell: True. I am counting the days to support any Democratic nominee.

I am also counting the days for Donald Trump to be gone. I don’t know when that will be. I think it’s way too unpredictable to speculate on that. And I’m taking three words: Organizing to Win.

Glasser: The chairman gets the last word here, thank you so much.

Perez: All right. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you again. And I’m going to make sure—back in ’89 there was a lot of hand-wringing and bed-wetting among some—oh my God, who will emerge in 1992? And we had a bumper crop of candidates that emerged, and there are some remarkable people here in D.C. and in state governorships, and mayors and others, and we’re going to have a robust field.

And what we’re going to do at the DNC is to make sure we create a level playing field for everyone and move forward in that way, so that we have a fair and open primary process.

The most important for me: Donald Trump is an embarrassment to our nation. I mean, every single day you see something else that is an embarrassment to our nation, and I think the most important thing we need to see right now is to make sure that Director Mueller’s investigation can proceed unimpeded, and you will see, I’m confident, more and more efforts behind the scenes by Trump, because he’s unencumbered by anything to go after Mueller, and now he’ll do it indirectly through surrogates. And we can’t allow that to happen, because it really is an affront on our democracy and we really do need to move forward.

I’m optimistic about our future as a party. It’s about winning. The Democratic Party, if I had to do one word: winning. We need to win elections, because one thing I’ve learned is that when Democrats win good things happen to a lot of folks, and when we don’t do so hot, we see a lot of chaos and carnage, and that’s been the story of 2017.

So, we’re building to win, and we build to win by making sure we put our values out there in a very clear way, and we communicate that optimistic vision. I am, notwithstanding that Rome is burning and it’s a five-alarm fire, I am chronically optimistic about our future, because the energy—and I get back to Neera’s point at the outset of this conversation—the energy that’s out there, and Mitch underscored it, is palpable, it’s unprecedented, it’s organic. And our challenge is to take that moment and turn it into a movement.

And I get back to what I said. That movement translates to victory. So, winning. When we win, good things happen.

Glasser: Well, I’ve got to thank you. I have to say, this is probably the first time any of us have seen the unique combination of optimism and Rome is burning in the same sentence.

I would say the other takeaway for all of us is that it’s pretty hard to escape from that one word, which is Trump. And that we could talk about artificial intelligence and the future of work, but it does circle back to this particular, unique historical moment we’re in, and nobody’s going to come away from this thinking that elections don’t have consequences anymore.

But I want to thank everyone here. This has been a really uniquely thoughtful and engaging and stimulating conversation. I know the listeners of The Global POLITICO will enjoy it. And of course, I want to thank not only all of you for being here today, but all of our listeners. They can listen to use on iTunes or whatever is their favorite podcast platform.

And of course you can always email me at sglasser@politico.com. I get lots of great ideas and feedback, amazingly, from these listeners. So, thanks again to everyone here and to all of you. That was great!